What I Read (and Wrote) in May

 

Image by Milad Fakurian from Unsplash

This will be a much shorter wrap-up than usual, as I didn’t get much writing done and my reading was confined to a couple of longer works. Sometimes life gets in the way of writing, y’know? 

Our family has a house in Yancey County in the NC mountains, and we are still dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene (and will be for years). We were much luckier than many – my mom was in the house as a landslide came down the mountain aimed right at her, but it was stopped by our driveway bridge over our creek. But we did get flood damage under the house and to the deck and the yard/plantings were swept clean, leaving behind huge piles of boulders and broken trees. 

A lot of that has been cleared off but we’ve got a lot of work left to do. If you’re interested in what it was like, this ProPublica story does the best job I’ve seen in describing what it was like for those that were there, including my mom. 

What I Wrote 

I didn’t get any original stories out until the end of May, with the publication of the two-part Know What You Write on Medium. What happens when an erotica writer wants to get inside the heads of the cuckolded husbands she writes about? Well, she talks her husband into fucking her stepsister while she watches, of course! 

And if you don’t have a Medium membership, I republished a few stories on Literotica. "Road Stories" continues with The Customer – Scott and his project manager are handsomely rewarded for a successful implementation of their software by the hot AVP in charge of the project. Some fun, hot hotel action ensues! 

If you ever get to Asheville, NC, make sure you stay at least once in the historic Grove Park Inn. That’s where F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a lot of “The Great Gatsby”. It’s a wonderful hotel (check out their spa!). I’ve got a two-part story on Literotica about a wedding there (it’s an awesome wedding venue). Grove Park: Wedding Bells focuses on the parents of the groom, who get asked to take care of the stepmother of the bride after she sees her husband run off with a bridesmaid. And they do take care of her in the most delicious ways. 

Grove Park: Wedding Night shifts focus to the bride and groom and the foursome they’ve planned for their wedding night, which unexpectedly becomes a fivesome. The groom’s not exactly thrilled with that change in plans, but there’s a happy ending (as all wedding stories should have). 

I mentioned on Bluesky that I’m working on a long, much different (for me) story involving demons, mind control, body modification and all kinds of crazy stuff. The first part will be published on Medium the second week of June – if you don’t have a Medium account, I believe it’s still only $5/month. I will eventually put it out as a novel, but you might not want to wait – it's going to be really good! 

What I Read 

I self-edit – most of us do. I’ve tried using volunteer editors with Literotica, but never found anyone who stuck around. So, I get that people make mistakes and occasionally miss things. I do it too. It’s hard to be perfect. But one of the hotwife story series that I was going to recommend this month is just too riddled with bad grammar, character name swaps, misspellings, and other mistakes that just take me out of the story. I may keep reading it, but I can’t recommend it. If you’re a writer, do please pay attention – it makes a difference! 

I recently posted an essay about the mind control sub-genre of erotica. I’ve spent a lot of this month reading two very different examples of good mind control stories. 

Nightfuel on mcstories.com has been posting “Serenity Falls” since November last year and is up to 30 parts. Given where the story is, I’m guessing there are at least another 8-10, but there could be more. It’s a slow burn, but a really good one. It definitely falls into the “accidental” MC camp, and it’s a lot more subtle than some as our hero gradually pieces together where this new-found power has come from and what he can and can’t (and should and shouldn’t) do with it. I recommend this one with no hesitation. 

On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve been rereading Wayne and Ann Triskelion’s Transformation series again. They started posting the story on Literotica in September of 2017 (I started reading it a few months in) and they’re up to over 100 parts (with at least another 40 to come, I’m guessing). It is a world-spanning, decades-spanning story of willful mind control, world domination, bimbofication, non-consensual sex... and it’s honestly a hell of a ride.  

Because they weren’t publishing frequently enough, I found myself getting lost in the long gaps between chapters, so after a couple of years I stopped reading. But I started over a few weeks ago and I’ve almost caught up to where they are now and I’ve done a much better job of keeping the cast straight. 

It might not be your cup of kombucha, but I’m enjoying the hell out of it. While they employ all the most outrageous tropes of mind control stories, there’s a tremendous heart and soul to the story that I just love. And the overarching storyline is complex, very well thought out, and tight as heck. I find it quite impressive, as well as a lot of fun. 

That’s it for May! I’m hoping June calms things down a little and I can do a little more writing. Stay dirty! 

 

She's Lost Total Control

 

Brownie points for anyone that identifies the source of the title without looking it up. 

I’ve written before about erotica sub-genres, particularly hotwife/cuckold and “daddy” age gap stories. Here’s my take on mind control... 

I’ve mentioned previously that a lot of my erotica reading material years ago came from ASSTR.org, a long-gone repository of not only the alt.sex.stories Usenet group, but other stuff like The Kristen Archives. It’s also where I ran across the link to mcstories.com, which is devoted to Mind Control erotica. That’s also a very popular category in Literotica. 

Mind Control erotica is weird. Don’t take that to mean that I don’t enjoy it, but it’s weird, sometimes in interesting ways. 

My theory of erotica sub-genres starts with the basics at one end of a spectrum – two people having sex. Don’t care if it’s two women, two men, one each, or any combination from the LGBTQ+ spectrum.  

As you move out along the spectrum, you get into sub-genres that focus on relationships outside of just “two people that fuck”. Group sex and threesomes, exhibitionism, maybe a focus on anal, cheating, age gap, interracial sex – those would seem to make up the next group of stories. You’re either adding another person or you’re focusing on a particular aspect of sex (but not quite to the fetish stage). I’d put hotwife/cuckolding at the outer edge of this area, because the humiliation that often accompanies those stories feels like it’s getting into real fetish territory. 

Further out in our model we get to the stuff that feels even more transgressive (to your average uptight person, not to us enlightened types, of course!). BDSM, non-consensual sex, truly fetishistic stuff like water sports and foot worship, incest/fauxcest - and mind control. 

Mind control is not the only sub-genre that’s almost as much exerting control (or being controlled) as it is about sex. I think most functioning adults live in a space where they feel like they have little control over their own lives, yet they also feel like they always must be completely in control of themselves. 

We feel like we’re controlled by our bosses, by the government, by our spouses, by our parents, by our customers. We’re controlled by expectations, maybe even those we put on ourselves. We get trapped into working our asses off for someone else, who may not have our best interests in mind. 

Conversely, we feel like we always have to be in control of ourselves – our emotions, our actions, our lives. We can’t just say that we don’t feel like going in to work or paying that bill – we have to maintain that control over ourselves in order to keep a roof over our heads. We don’t always feel like we can be honest about our feelings, so we suppress them. 

It’s got to be a hundred times worse for women. They are under much more pressure to control the way they look, control the way they talk, and for safety’s sake, control their environment. 

I have not read any of the studies that explain why many women have rape fantasies, but I would be surprised if one of the reasons isn’t the fantasy of being forced to let go of that constant control over every aspect of their lives. 

Conversely, almost all mind control erotica (at least within the stuff that I’ve read), is focused on gaining control – I rarely read anything from the perspective of the person being controlled, unless they’re going to turn the tables later. Way too much of it is boring revenge fantasy – on that asshole boss, that frigid wife, that cheerleader that ignored your pimply face when you were in high school. They're similar in some ways to the male revenge fantasies that some guys demand be part of every hotwife story. But there are exceptions. 

Generally, mind control stories can mostly be broken down into two categories: purposeful mind control and accidental mind control. 

Accidental mind control usually starts with our hero (almost always male) suddenly being given powers that s/he never had before. The sources of MC are many, so it’s amazing that we don’t ALL have that ability! 

• • A ring inherited from a dying/dead (male) relative, usually with some cryptic warning about its use and the consequences that go along with it. 
  • An alien ray gun or some other alien experiment 
  • An accident or blow to the head that activates some hitherto unused part of the brain 
  • A genetic abnormality that runs in the family and is somehow uncannily activated on our hero’s eighteenth birthday 
  • A magic spell bestowed on our hero after he selflessly does some good deed for an old crone/witch/gypsy 

• 
  

Well, you get the picture. 

These aren’t people that were seeking this on purpose, so there is usually a discovery phase where they figure out what they can do and the extent of their power(s). And then they inevitably create a fucking harem (I swear to you, every damn time – more on this later). 

The willful mind controllers are a different breed entirely. These guys (again, almost always guys) set out to control people, so their motives/ethics are immediately and obviously bad. A ton of these stories are Revenge of the Nerd fantasies of getting back at the people (jocks, cheerleaders, siblings, and bosses in particular) that made their lives hell. 

These genius loser boys will invent some mind control device or create some pheromone enhancer or summon a demon or learn hypnosis specifically so that they can get back at the people that they feel wronged them. And then they inevitably create a fucking harem. 

Along with controlling minds, a large number of mind control stories also include body modification (usually bigger boobs and bigger dicks). There are whole series of stories focused on “bimbofication” - often again as part of a revenge fantasy. Ugh – I mean, I don’t want to harsh your buzz, but come on. 

If you’ve read any mind control at all, you’ve undoubtedly run across “MasterPC” stories. The damn things have been around since floppy disks and people are still writing into the idea that there’s a PC program (sorry, Mac users!) that can be used to alter everything about a targeted person, including their personality, sexuality and their bodies (it of course also works on the user, so they get the big dick and stamina they need in order to take advantage of the bimbos they create). 

I’ve read a few of them that are sorta clever, but most of them are pretty formulaic – ending inevitably with the guy creating a fucking harem. Sigh.

This harem thing – I mean, we’re talking about guys that are clearly incapable of satisfying even one woman, and they think they need a houseful of hot women now? And just the cost and the logistics of maintaining a harem is daunting (which might be that the smarter guys usually find some incredibly wealthy women to control). Nice idea, but pretty impractical. :) 

Reading this, it may seem that I have no use for the Mind Control sub-genre, but that is not at all true. While much of it is poorly written, there is also some very good stuff out there. There are even a number of those stories that have some subtlety to them, either in the way the stories are told or in the way the powers are manifested. 

There was a guy (I’m pretty sure it was a guy) posting as “Ameaner” on Literotica a dozen years ago that wrote several long, interrelated stories that were slower to build and weren’t even obviously mind control stories until you got well into them. They were very well done, particularly with the way they handled the growing callousness that one could reasonably assume might accompany those sorts of mental powers. The protagonists were not nice people, but they were not so unsympathetic that you didn’t want to read them. 

More recently I enjoyed C W March’s “Augur” series (also on Literotica and published under the author name “Kinje”). A minor wizard talent accidentally enslaves a sin demon. And then a Fae. And he keeps having accidents until he’s got a whole accidental fantasy harem. It sounds silly (and it kinda is) but it’s also well-written, good-hearted and entertaining. What more could you ask for? 

When I get to my month-end wrap-up, I’ll go into a little more detail on a couple of the things I’ve been reading in this space that I quite like. And I’ve got a half-dozen ideas for my own mind control stories that I’m hoping to write soon, as well as one that will premiere next month!